How to Kick-Start a Habit of Regular Retrospectives

Agile teams around the world understand how quickly small incremental changes every sprint can add up to huge improvements in team performance.

So how can you benefit from a habit of continuous improvement if you haven’t run a retrospective in a long time, or you’ve never done one before?  

Getting started can feel daunting, especially since each retrospective meeting is meant to build on the last one. But retrospectives are an ongoing process, even for experienced teams. You can’t solve everything in one meeting, so don’t try to. 

In this guide, we’re covering how to build a habit of running sprint retrospectives: 

In an ideal world, teams should conduct retrospective meetings after every sprint. However, there are a few reasons why you might not have done one for a while or at all!:

Whether you’re starting out or getting back into the rhythm of doing sprint retrospectives, take a page from change management principles. 

Try to introduce retrospectives into your working rhythm when there’s already change underway. This makes a regular cadence of retrospectives part of the “new normal” and helps the habit stick.  

You can also make the end of the next sprint your “change point”, to anchor it, but try to link it up with other changes if possible so there’s already momentum on the team. 

Examples include:

Overall changes make it easy to push a new idea forward, but there’s no sense in artificially holding off in the absence of one. 

Sometimes starting retrospectives when things aren’t so busy can feel less stressful and make it easier for a team to give retrospectives the time and attention they deserve. 

Instead of jumping into a classic retrospective process right off the bat, get started by doing a broader post-mortem to deal with any existing baggage or improvements. We recommend doing to retros to kickstart your process: 

Think of the backlog retrospective like your time to “train” everyone on how to participate in retrospectives and identify immediate improvements that may have been swept under the rug when there were no retrospectives at all. 

Host this meeting at the end of the sprint where you’ve chosen to launch (or relaunch) regular retrospectives. Go through the mechanics of a retrospective, explain the process, and explain some participant tips so everyone’s ready to bring their A-game. You could also review some pro-tips for retrospective facilitators, too, if you’re feeling a bit rusty, or let us help you out with a failsafe way of running retrospectives.

Use this retrospective more like a post-mortem where you talk through how work is going in general over a longer period of time. What big things are working, and what big things aren’t? You might also want to cover how people feel about their work. The goal of this meeting is to make quick wins and deal with any baggage the team is holding onto. 

You can also use this retro to go back further to discuss past projects, again only with an eye to what worked and what didn’t. If you’re looking into the past, you might want to restrict it to just the last quarter because people’s memories can fade and things change rapidly. Anything farther back than three months might not be very relevant for you moving forward.

Host this meeting at the end of the next sprint (after the one where you run a backlog retrospective). Send the calendar invite for this meeting as soon as the sprint begins. That way, you set a precedent for creating a regular retrospective habit. 

Type of retrospective

Once you’ve hosted a broad scope retro and your first official retro, it’s time to make the habit continuous. Here are some tips we find helpful for making sure your retrospective habit sticks!

After the first official retrospective: 

These practices help with the concept of habit stacking, where you commit to one task then ‘stack’ it automatically with something else. 

Since sprint retrospectives are designed to be done at the end of each sprint, if you book the meeting automatically, you are creating a habit stack where you complete a sprint then immediately do a retrospective. 

Treat this time as sacred, and eventually it becomes an ingrained habit that the team does without thinking.

Some other pointers for future retrospectives: 

A big part of habit formation is automation and consistency. 

If you make booking seamless and easy (with recurring calendar invites) and follow through consistently on sharing action items, you’re well on your way to a strong retrospective habit. 

In Parabol, you can set up your retro board as soon as you’ve finished your last one. That way, teams can contribute reflections asynchronously throughout the sprint. 

Leaders play a significant role in adjusting behavior towards the retrospective process. The biggest piece of this is reiterating and reminding team members that the purpose of the retrospective is to address team collaboration challenges. 

So if you had a culture of people bringing up these issues ad-hoc throughout a sprint, tell team members to write down their questions or concerns for the retrospective. 

You can encourage the team to do this asynchronously, which will make your retrospectives more time zone friendly and avoid recency bias – where you prioritize the most recent challenge instead of taking a bigger picture view of what’s important for the whole team.

This kind of reinforcement has two further benefits: 

If your team isn’t responding to the traditional structure of a retrospective, here are a few things to try: 

Retrospectives help people come together and honestly discuss the good and the bad of working with each other. Each time teams invest in this process, they form stronger bonds as humans and as a team. 

Teams that run regular retrospectives are more resilient, adaptive, and tend to have more psychological safety. And because retrospectives compound on one another, each meeting provides more benefit than the previous one. 

If you haven’t done a retrospective in a while – or ever – it’s easy to get the habit started. While you can’t expect a miracle after just one meeting, you’ll start to see improvements quickly.

As the famous Chinese proverb goes:

So what are you waiting for? 

To get started quickly, try Parabol for your first (or your next) retrospective!